Clearly the jury's still out on this one, but I take the point about wing shape. It's only in the final shot it looks really long winged, there is basically quite a bit of bulge there, and in my experience - a few clear examples here in HK, and more at Beidaihe/Happy Island a few years back - the eastern examples of Eurasian Sparrowhawk are, as I indicated in my previous post, really relatively harrier-like in shape, recalling Montagu's Harrier almost, to my mind at least - this bird isn't that shape.
If it is Japanese, and I'm not suggesting for a moment it isn't, it would seem to me to quite a 'rangey', less compact example than many. Maybe bigger females can get like that?
Mike Turnbull
